Biography:Well known for her studies of WB Yeats and James Joyce's wife, Nora, Brenda Maddox has now turned her attention to another enigmatic Celt. Ernest Jones (1879-1958) was Freud's most loyal follower but the least regarded.
A brilliant young Welsh physician, who was probably the first Briton to take Freud's ideas seriously and who became associated with the psychoanalytic movement as early as 1907, Jones gradually made himself indispensable to the Viennese master. Freud began by regarding him with amused contempt but, as he fell out successively with all his closest associates - Breuer, Fliess, Adler, Stekel, Jung, Ferenczi, and so on - came to appreciate Jones's loyalty possibly even more than his limitless energy and analytical talents. Freud had hoped that his "crown prince", Carl Gustav Jung, would be the St Paul of the movement, taking a "Jewish" idea to the Gentiles. As is well known, Freud and Jung quarrelled acrimoniously, opening a breach that was never healed. With Jones, however, psychoanalysis found a brilliant interpreter and promoter in the all- important English-speaking world.
By 1929 Freud had come to appreciate Jones's true worth, which he expressed to him in a letter as follows: "I have always counted you as one of my closer family members, and will continue to do so, which indicates - beyond all the discords that are seldom lacking within a family and have also not been lacking between us - a fund of tenderness that one can draw on time and again".
By this time Jones was president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, editor of its English language journal and publishing house, associate editor of its German language publication (he learned German expressly to be Freud's right-hand man) and president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, with absolute power to decide who could and who could not practice psychoanalysis in the UK. He had formed a secret committee of loyalists to protect Freud and his doctrine, modelled on Charlemagne's paladins, and had written a number of seminal papers, on the theory of symbolism, the early development of female sexuality, on nightmares and (most famously) Hamlet and the Oedipus Complex. Yet a suspicion of charlatanry always hovered around Jones. In part this was because of his relentless womanising, but he was also arrogant, a liar, a shameless intriguer, devious, ruthless, duplicitous, manipulative. Brenda Maddox makes a valiant attempt to reconcile all the contradictions in Jones. In her work she has sometimes been accused of sacrificing scholarly content for journalistic "good copy", but such an approach, which would not work so well with Adler or Ferenczi, say, is peculiarly appropriate in the case of Jones, who was above all a populariser of genius. His three-volume life of Freud is a fundamental tract in the history of psychoanalysis and will never be totally supplanted.
Jones was a rare combination of talents: an omnivorous reader, a workaholic, a good administrator, a wily politician and, above all, a brilliant "fixer". Maddox seems unsure what to make of him and, although her overall verdict is favourable, her narrative is dotted with an arm's-length ambivalence.This can sometimes lead her to eccentric judgements. For example, she thinks he was guilty, early in his career, of exposing himself to four mentally defective children, but can supply no credible motive. His moneymaking abilities leave her uneasy. She blames him for taking a three-week motoring holiday in Wales during the battle of the Somme and says: "During the war that had taken 750,000 lives, Jones had turned himself into a man of means." Unless, absurdly, some kind of cause and effect is implied here, it is difficult to see her point. Jones was 37 during the battle of the Somme and, anyway, is she seriously suggesting the war would have turned out differently if he had practised Spartan austerity? Fortunately,such lapses of judgement are rare in a generally well-balanced,well-researched, lucid and entertaining account. She is particularly good on the women in Jones's life: his common-law wife Loe Kann, his long-time mistress Lina (no surname survives), his first wife Morfydd Owen, a musician who died after a year of marriage from a botched appendectomy, and finally his second wife, Kitty Jokl, a Moravian Jew whom Jones married, Maddox suggests, in part because Freud was also a Moravian.
Five feet four inches in height, beginning as an obscure boyo from the valleys, Jones initially reminds one of the similarly short-statured Welsh "hero", HM Stanley, another classic of "compensation" with boundless energy and chilling ambition. But there the comparison ends for, unlike the tortured asexual Stanley, Jones was catnip to women. An American journalist summed him up well as "a tart little Welshman, thin as a wishbone, as unrelentingly alert as radar". Whatever his faults, Jones performed the supreme service for Freud. After the Anschluss in 1938, when all Austrian Jews were in mortal danger from the Nazis, Jones arranged for Freud to resettle in Hampstead, north London.Through his political contacts, especially with Sir Samuel Hoare, Jones actually got immigration and work permits not just for Freud and family but the entire membership of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society; moreover, he persuaded the Nazis to let them go. This puts Jones on the side of the angels, however morally ambivalent he was elsewhere. He deserves a good biography, and here he gets one. Brenda Maddox's sharp, incisive portrait is a great improvement on Vincent Brome's inadequate life of 20 years ago. The Welsh sorcerer has found his apprentice.
Frank McLynn is the author of Jung: A Biography (1996). His latest book is Lionheart and Lackland (Cape)
Freud's Wizard: The Enigma of Ernest Jones By Brenda Maddox John Murray, 354pp. £25